I built MCE Controller as something that would be useful for my own home. I had minor aspirations of making it do more than it does, but the reality is that I don’t really have the time nor the inclination (it works beautifully for me as is).
Until today I have resisted making it open source for the simple reason that I didn’t really understand what it would take to put the source out there in some controlled manner. I have downloaded apps from SourceForge but have never played with any source code in that way. All I knew was that the tools to upload stuff looked weird.
I finally bit the bullet and just did it. MCE Controller is now an “open source project”. My hope is that a few others will join in and build upon what I started in cool ways. If not, oh well, it still works for me. (My fear is that people will see the code and see how cruddy a programmer I am).
Go to http://kindel.com/products/mcecontroller to get the low-down on what MCE Controller is and does. Then go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcecontroller to download the binary or check out the source.
If you are interested in participating in enhancing it let me know.
Oh, MCE Controller is written in C# using VS7.
A bunch of us were sitting around arguing about why people are buying these inexpensive NAS (Network Attached Storage) boxes. Then we started arguing about who was buying them. I’ve poured over all the market research I can find and neither of these two questions are answered:
- Who is buying them (home users, tech enthusiasts, small business owners, corporate workgroup folk, etc…)?
- Why are they buying them (more storage, backup, sharing, …)?
So I figure I’ll do a bit of my own poor-man’s research using the amazing (ha!) power of the blog.
Tell me about you, why you have a NAS (at home, at biz, etc…), what kind of NAS is it, how much it costs, and what you use it for. Do you like it? Was it too expensive, is it too slow, etc…?
Me, I personally have a bunch of NAS devices. I have them because I want to understand how they work and what they enable. I don’t really need these NAS boxes because I use a Windows 2003 powered server as my primary storage (in other words, this box acts as a NAS).
I have a Linksys EFG-120 that I use as a backup target (see my mini-review). It’s painfully slow (particularly on writes) and was pretty expensive.
I also have a Linksys NSLU2 which is a novel idea but a total pain to use because you end up with 3 discrete devices (the NSLU2 and 2 USB drives), 3 power cables with bricks, 2 USB cables, and a network cable. I don’t use it.
I recently purchased a Buffalo TeraStation. This monster promises 1TB of RAID 5 capable storage in a single box for less than $1000. It has 4 internal 250GB IDE drives. Out of the box it has 1TB of usable space in a spanned (RAID 0) configuration. This is just stupid. Stupid. Stupid. If any of the 4 drives fail you will lose EVERYTHING on all 4 drives. Dumb. If you configure it to use RAID 5 for reliability you get about 650GB of usable space. That’s great. However, I found the usability (particularly around dealing with permissions) horrific and read/write performance was abysmal (~11MB/sec read and 5MB/sec write no matter how the RAID was configured) even on a gigabit Ethernet network. Since performance is so bad I’m not quite sure how I’m going to use it. I’ll probably replace the Linksys EFG120 in it’s backup target role.
For reference my 900MHz PIII Windows 2003 server using software RAID 1 gets 30+MB/sec read/write performance.
Anyway, let me know what you think about all these NAS products…
I wish I could read more books. I love reading. That’s the problem. I start a book, and if it’s any good, I read it cover to cover in one sitting. Even if it takes me 2 days. Instead of fixing this by being more discliplined about putting books down, I’ve taken the stance of just avoiding starting books. That way I can have a life.
This weekend, however, I broke my rule (for the 2nd time in as many weeks), and read a book. This one was Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. I have always been a huge science fiction fan and literally grew up on Robert A. Heinlien novels. I’m sure John is getting sick of hearing this, but Old Man’s War reads just like a Heinlien book. Only better.
If you liked Heinlien and are looking for a good read, buy Old Man’s War and read it.
John Scalzi & I went to the same high-school (he was a year behind me I). I re-connected with John Scalzi last year when a high-school friend let me know John had a online book called Agent to The Stars. (I used Agent to the Stars for my Page 23 test).